Open skies

It was a quiet, clear night at Heathrow airport as we lined up for take-off on runway 27L. The plane accelerated down the runway and smoothly lifted into the air, climbing to 6,000ft.

Nothing particularly unusual about this, except I was flying the plane. The other unusual thing was that we were actually in Bournemouth and not Heathrow at all.

I finally got to use my Christmas present, which was a spin in a commercial flight simulator. In this case a Boeing 727 (an aircraft not seen in Europe anymore – due to noise restrictions - but still common in Africa).

We travelled down to Bournemouth Airport and to European Aviation. It all looks quite impressive as you drive into their offices as there’s a huge hanger with a number of airliners being serviced – these guys are obviously the real thing. We were soon ushered through into the simulator area where 4 simulators are housed – these are big impressive beasts – and had a great talk about the way they worked and the different simulators (a B737-200, B747-100/200/300, S-61 Sea King helicopter and a B727-200) (Note: their website is out of date).

Then on to the actual flight briefing. I have flown once before in a Diamond DA20 for half and hour from Blackbushe Airport (last year’s present) and have pounded Microsoft flight sim for a few hours in preparation, so the instruments and controls were reasonably familiar to me. The plan was to take off, fly a circuit around Heathrow, try a few turns and then come in for a landing – it seemed a pretty tall order to me, but I tried to sound confident and asked a few pertinent questions about climb speeds and power settings to try to appear as if I had at least a bit of a clue.

Then it was over to the simulator, up onto the gantry and across the bridge. Inside was like stepping back to the 60s or 70s (which we were) – the plane was launched in the mid 60s and this simulator was built in 1979. But this was good – it was a lot simpler than the modern aircraft flight decks with hardly a computer in sight (except the pocket-calculator looking navigation computer). Even the simulator control console at the back looked more like a modified fruit machine than a sophisticated computer, with just a monochrome display and lots of obscurely labelled buttons.

The flight-deck environment appeared very authentic to me, down to the individual circuit breakers on the rear bulkheads, and the air conditioning, keeping it cooler than outside. It was also rather dark, which is when I realised it would be a night flight – computers of the ‘70s weren’t up to generating daytime scenes, so you had a fairly basic set of runway lights through the front window and that was about it.

So, into the big chair on the left (my instructor / first officer climbed in on the right) and a quick run-through all the instruments and controls – including the engine gauges (just for fun). Herself was to be our flight engineer (these were the days of 3 people on the flight-deck). A quick try of the controls – ailerons, rudder, elevators revealed them to be very heavy. The engine controls were pretty much as expected (three levers in the middle), but the flaps and speed brake seemed very clunky and the landing gear was a huge lever to the right of the centre console. I’m pretty sure that modern airline pilots would find it all very quaint and amusing.

It was time to go, so feet on the rudder pedals, a suitably large lever released the parking brake and then it was full thrust on the 3 engines. The whine of the noisy jets grew somewhere behind us and the flight deck started moving slightly – the front window showed us gathering speed down the runway. Some fairly ham-fisted rudder controls kept us on the runway – just about – and the airspeed indicator climbed upwards. “V1” I heard (the point of no return) and then “Rotate”, I pulled back on the column and the flight deck pitched up and the runway lights disappeared beneath us – we were airborne.

It took some doing to keep us climbing at 15 degrees – the plane was quite sensitive but everything had a delay before it responded. We eventually levelled out at 6,000ft and tried some turns. I found initiating them was fine, but it was hard to stop right on the heading you wanted and keep the plane level – I also kept losing height, especially banking at 30 degrees. I got gradually better as the flight progressed though – especially not losing height. I also played with the trim which caused these big wheels to whizz round and round on the centre console, which was good fun.

Eventually I had to do my final turn back towards the runway. The ILS lined us up but we were way over to the left, so I did quite a nice transit (I thought), back onto the approach line and started my approach. Throttles back to idle and nose down to about 2 degrees to give us a 3 degree approach angle. I was pretty well lined up, but kept forgetting to look at the glide slope indicator, so came in rather high. Extending the flaps caused some fun as well as the lift changed, making me even higher, and pulling the big landing gear lever down actually changed the way the plane felt (and made it much more noisy). I pitched the nose down a bit more and managed to come in, albeit a bit far down the runway.

I was rather worried about the flare, but the radar altimeter gave me the cue and I pulled the nose up and then we felt a bump and heard the tyres squeal and we were down. I pulled up the reverse thrust on the throttles, clunked the big speed brake lever on and then cranked up full reverse thrust. I almost forgot to steer, but with a gentle reminder I just managed to keep us going straight. Brakes on, and throttle down and there we were, back on terra-firma – virtually, at least.

We clambered out from the seats and had a look at the simulator track. My landing was pretty good in terms of heading, but right on the limit in terms of glide slope – I kicked myself for not looking at the ILS, but I was otherwise pretty pleased – a couple more goes and I think I’d really get the hang of it.

The folks at European Aviation were really friendly and gave me my full time on the simulator as well as making it challenging but fun. This isn’t something you’d want to do lots of times, but it’s nice to be able to say you landed an airliner at Heathrow, even if you do have to add the footnote that it was a simulator.